This attractive, beige-brick apartment house
in Carnegie Hill has a superb, quiet location across from the
reservoir in Central Park and a block north of where most parades
terminate on Fifth Avenue.

The 87-unit, cooperative building was erected
in 1950 and designed by George F. Pelham.

One block south of the Guggenheim Museum, this
building has a very attractive dark polished granite entrance
and a garage on the side-street. A major supermarket is one block
away on Madison Avenue and the Carnegie Hill area has some of
the citys most important museums, finest schools and loveliest
churches.

Many of this buildings handsome balconies
have been enclosed over the years to enlarge apartment living
rooms. Such enclosures compromise the building's original architectural
integrity and raise serious zoning questions as they had considerable
more interior space to building without providing any additional
public amenities for such an important bonus. It is not the only
building to have had some many balconies enclosed on Fifth Avenue,
but the practice is highly questionable and should have roused
the ire of the city's civic watchdog organizations that appear
to have been uninterested, uninformed and/or blind to these actions
that make a mockery of the city's regulations.

The building has a quite rhythmic facade of
indentations and projections.

The building has excellent views of Central
Park and is across the avenue from a local downtown bus stop and
there is excellent Cross-town bus service one block away at 86th
Street.The building has a concierge and
a doorman and a garage, but no sun deck and no health club. It
has a canopied entrance with a large curved stainless steel marquee
and a handsome polished gray marble entrance surround as shown
in the above photograph. It has a two-story limestone base and
many corner windows.

The building was erected on the former site
of the James Speyer mansion, which had been willed to the Museum
of the City of New York.

In their excellent book, "New York 1960,
Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the
Bicentennial" (The Monacelli Press, 1995, Robert A. M. Stern,
Thomas Mellins and David Fishman provide the following commentary
about this building:

"The principal features of Pelham's generally
bland nineteen-story, beige-brick block was the placement of a
one-story parking garage adjacent to the building along Eighty-seventh
Street, which guaranteed light and air to the rear apartments
and fostered the appearance of a freestanding tower, as Raymond
Hood had done in his American Radiator (1924) and Daily News (1929)
buildings. The arrangement was widely studied by developers and
planners, particularly as the City Planning Commission began to
consider revisions to the zoning ordinance that would reduce allowable
bulk to insure more light and air for surrounding streets. The
building's principal facade combined cantilevered and recessed
terraces in a syncopated composition that was more visually chaotic
than interesting. The editors of Architectural Forum observed
that in an 'effort to assuage the city dweller's hankering for
a front porch all his own, space is snipped from the living room
to allow for patching in a petite balcony.' The lobby was designed
by Beryl Austrian to evoke, as the decorator put it, 'the spirit
and character' of the demolished Speyer mansion."